"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

This day in History: Jun 19, 1953: Rosenbergs executed

On this day in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were
convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets, are
executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York.
Both refused to admit any wrongdoing and proclaimed their innocence
right up to the time of their deaths, by the electric chair. The
Rosenbergs were the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed for
espionage during peacetime and their case remains controversial to this
day.

Julius Rosenberg was an engineer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps who
was born in New York on May 12, 1918. His wife, born Ethel Greenglass,
also in New York, on September 28, 1915, worked as a secretary. The
couple met as members of the Young Communist League, married in 1939 and
had two sons. Julius Rosenberg was arrested on suspicion of espionage
on June 17, 1950, and accused of heading a spy ring that passed
top-secret information concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
Ethel was arrested two months later. The Rosenbergs were implicated by
David Greenglass, Ethel's younger brother and a former army sergeant and
machinist at Los Alamos, the secret atomic bomb lab in New Mexico.
Greenglass, who himself had confessed to providing nuclear secrets to
the Soviets through an intermediary, testified against his sister and
brother-in-law in court. He later served 10 years in prison.

The Rosenbergs vigorously protested their innocence, but after a
brief trial that began on March 6, 1951, and attracted much media
attention, the couple was convicted. On April 5, 1951, a judge sentenced
them to death and the pair was taken to Sing Sing to await execution.

During the next two years, the couple became the subject of both
national and international debate. Some people believed that the
Rosenbergs were the victims of a surge of hysterical anti-communist
feeling in the United States,
and protested that the death sentence handed down was cruel and unusual
punishment. Many Americans, however, believed that the Rosenbergs had
been dealt with justly.

They agreed with President Dwight D. Eisenhower
when he issued a statement declining to invoke executive clemency for
the pair. He stated, "I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing
the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death
tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of
two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of
the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what
these spies have done."